Â PARIS/TEHRAN (Reuters) â€“ Iran is turning to barter â€“ offering gold bullion in overseas vaults or tankerloads of oil â€“ in return for food as new financial sanctions have hurt its ability to import basic staples for its 74 million people, commodities traders said Thursday. Â Â From Yahoo NewsÂ thanks to Vlad

Difficulty paying for urgent import needs has contributed to sharp rises in the prices of basic foodstuffs, causing hardship for Iranians with just weeks to go before an election seen as a referendum on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s economic policies.

New sanctions imposed by the United States and European Union to punish Iran for its nuclear program do not bar firms from selling Iran food but they make it difficult to carry out the international financial transactions needed to pay for it.

Reuters surveys of commodities traders around the globe show that since the start of the year, Iran has had trouble securing imports of basic staples like rice, cooking oil, animal feed and tea. Grain ships have been held at its ports, refusing to unload until payment can be received for cargo.

With Iran’s rial currency tumbling, the prices of rice, bread and meat in Iranian bazaars have doubled or more in dollar terms in recent months.

Iranian grain importers have in the past side-stepped sanctions by booking business through the United Arab Emirates, traders said, but this option was cut off by the UAE government in response to sanctions.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center charged today that recent statements by Iran’s Supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei along with aÂ detailed blueprint for the destruction of the Jewish people posted on a website run by the head of the Iranian Parliament’s research center, constituted a pre-genocidal crime against humanity, unparalleled since Nazi Germany.

In his speech last Friday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei again called Israel “a cancerous tumor” that had to be removed. Now Iranian analyst Alireza Forghani writing on the Alef website (and posted on the official FARS news agency) details a plan for Iran to remove “this corrupting material” to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel.

“This is the first time since the Nazis’ Final Solution that such explicit plans for a genocide against the Jewish people is being promoted,”Â charged Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, dean and founder and associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish human rights NGO.

“Just last week, the United Nations convened a ceremony on International Holocaust Memorial Day. But what good are moments of silence for the dead, if the world powers â€” including Russia and China fail to take action to protect the living from a new genocide targeting Jews. A nuclearized Iran, controlled by religious Nazis would not hesitate to mass murder Jews,”Â Wiesenthal Center officialsÂ continued.

“While we applaud President Obama for ratcheting up sanctions against the Mullahtocracy, much more must be done, including an international effort to pursue an indictment against Iranian leaders who are guilty of inciting genocide â€” which is a crime against humanity,”Â they concluded.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe, and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).

For more information, please contact the Center’s Public Relations Department, 310-553-9036, join the Center on Facebook,Â www.facebook.com/simonwiesenthalcenter, or follow @simonwiesenthal for news updates sent direct to your Twitter page or mobile device.